Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By : Thomas Mooney
Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By: Thomas Mooney

Overview of this book

UDK is a free, world class game editing tool and being so powerful it can be daunting to learn. This guide offers an excellent set of targeted recipes to help game artists get up to speed with game designing in UDK.Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook contains everything you need to jumpstart your game design efforts. The lessons are aimed squarely at the artist's field of production, with recipes on asset handling, creating content within the editor, animation and visual scripting to get the content working in gameplay.Unreal Game Development Kit Game Design Cookbook exposes how real-time environments are built using UDK tools. Key features are examined ñ assets, animation, light, materials, game controls, user interface, special effects, and game interactivity - with the view of making UDK technically accessible so users can transcend technique and focus on their creative design process. The book has well prepared recipes for level designers and artists of all levels. It covers core design tools and processes in the editor, particularly setting up characters, UI approaches, configuration and scripting gameplay. It is a technical guide that allows game artists to go beyond just creating assets, and it includes creative, extensive demonstrations that extend on mere functionality.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


Lighting in UDK is built around real-time requirements. Epic Games provides the neatest explanation of the features that UDK includes in terms of Rendering, Shaders, and "Eye-Popping Lighting and Shadows" on their front page at http://www.UDK.com/features.

  • Illuminate

    UDK gives you all the options to perfectly light any scene. Ambient occlusion, per-pixel lighting, fill lighting, and fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections are all possible.

  • Unreal Lightmass

    Unreal Lightmass is an advanced global illumination solver, custom built to fully take advantage of all that Unreal Engine 3 has to offer. Light your world with a single sun, give off soft shadows, and let the diffuse inter-reflection (color bleeding) do the work.

  • Detailed Shadows

    Advanced shadowing with support for three techniques:

    • Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft shadows.

    • Ultra high-quality and high-performance pre-computed shadow masks.

    • Directional light mapping with static shadowing and diffuse normal-mapped lighting...